“No, no,” he said, “Yap’s no good at sport. I’ll have regular good dogs for rats and everything, when I’ve done school.” “Hev ferrets, Measter Tom,” said Bob, eagerly,—“them white ferrets wi’ pink eyes; Lors, you might catch your own rots, an’ you might put a rot in a cage wi’ a ferret, an’ see ’em fight, you might. That’s what I’d do, I know, an’ it ’ud be better fun a’most nor seein’ two chaps fight,—if it wasn’t them chaps as sold cakes an’ oranges at the Fair, as the things flew out o’ their baskets, an’ some o’ the cakes was smashed—But they tasted just as good,” added Bob, by way of note or addendum, after a moment’s pause. “But, I say, Bob,” said Tom, in a tone of deliberation, “ferrets are nasty biting things,—they’ll bite a fellow without being set on.” “Lors! why that’s the beauty on ’em. If a chap lays hold o’ your ferret, he won’t be long before he hollows out a good un, _he_ won’t.” At this moment a striking incident made the boys pause suddenly in their walk. It was the plunging of some small body in the water from among the neighbouring bulrushes; if it was not a water-rat, Bob intimated that he was ready to undergo the most unpleasant consequences. “Hoigh! Yap,—hoigh! there he is,” said Tom, clapping his hands, as the little black snout made its arrowy course to the opposite bank. “Seize him, lad! seize him!” Yap agitated his ears and wrinkled his brows, but declined to plunge, trying whether barking would not answer the purpose just as well. “Ugh! you coward!” said Tom, and kicked him over, feeling humiliated as a sportsman to possess so poor-spirited an animal. Bob abstained from remark and passed on, choosing, however, to walk in the shallow edge of the overflowing river by way of change. “He’s none so full now, the Floss isn’t,” said Bob, as he kicked the water up before him, with an agreeable sense of being insolent to it. “Why, last ’ear, the meadows was all one sheet o’ water, they was.” “Ay, but,” said Tom, whose mind was prone to see an opposition between statements that were really accordant,—“but there was a big flood once, when the Round Pool was made. _I_ know there was, ’cause father says so. And the sheep and cows all drowned, and the boats went all over the fields ever such a way.” “_I_ don’t care about a flood comin’,” said Bob; “I don’t mind the water, no more nor the land. I’d swim, _I_ would.” “Ah, but if you got nothing to eat for ever so long?” said Tom, his imagination becoming quite active under the stimulus of that dread. “When I’m a man, I shall make a boat with a wooden house on the top of it, like Noah’s ark, and keep plenty to eat in it,—rabbits and things,—all ready. And then if the flood came, you know, Bob, I shouldn’t mind. And I’d take you in, if I saw you swimming,” he added, in the tone of a benevolent patron. “I aren’t frighted,” said Bob, to whom hunger did not appear so appalling. “But I’d get in an’ knock the rabbits on th’ head when you wanted to eat ’em.”